scott church

Four Faculty Members Won Prestigious Awards at the Annual University Conference; Three Faculty Members Were Recognized During the College Meeting

Bryant Will Graduate in April 2023 With a BA in Communications: Comms Studies

Four Faculty Members Won Prestigious Awards at the Annual University Conference; Three Faculty Members Were Recognized During the College Meeting

Communications professor Scott H. Church (BA ’05) liked the ’80s before it was cool. One of his favorite TV shows is Freaks and Geeks, a cult classic about high schoolers in the 1980s.

Disney princesses excite and inspire young girls all over the world, captivating them with beauty, bravery and royal status. This princess frenzy — a hallmark of the childhood experience — also fuels passionate debates about the unrealistic expectations these characters set, especially concerning body image and romantic relationships. BYU communications professors Tom Robinson, Clark Callahan and Scott Church, along with graduate students Mckenzie Madsen and Lucia Pollock, recently published their research paper “Virtue, royalty, dreams and power: Exploring the appeal of Disney Princesses to preadolescent girls in the United States” which investigates the topic through the eyes of the girls themselves. “This study is unique because it’s talking about Disney princesses, but it’s not an adult talking about them,” Robinson said. “We’re showing what the young girls themselves think and discovered that they do not all think alike.” Read the full article at comms.byu.edu

Scott Haden Church has a confession: At the start of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” he rolled his eyes. The opening scene — a person running down a hallway of flickering lights, reaching an elevator and frantically pushing the buttons to escape a mysterious creature — wasn’t anything new. That the person ends up getting demolished by the creature anyway was even more predictable. Despite his initial hesitation, Church finished the first season of “Stranger Things” in three days. Aside from wondering what happened to Eleven and how being in the Upside Down would continue to affect Will, Church had another question on his mind: Why did he like the show so much? He wasn’t alone. In 2017, Netflix ratings confirmed that during the first three days season two of “Stranger Things” was made available on Netflix, 15.8 million people watched the first episode. As a whole the season averaged 8.8 million viewers per episode, and 361,000 people watched all nine episodes of the season within the first 24 hours of its release. Church soon after began his “Stranger Things” research — which he first presented last year at the Pop Culture Association in Indianapolis — by closely watching the show and picking apart the episodes to find how the Duffer brothers had remixed elements of ‘80s pop culture to create a new story. Read the full Deseret News article.

Scott Church presented on media and politics to the National Communications Association.

The BYU School of Communications will host Scott Church, assistant professor in the School of Communications, in conjunction with the Raymond E. and Ida Lee Beckham Lecture in Communications Series March 16 at 11:00 a.m. in 321 of the Maeser building. Church will present his lecture, “The Art of Mass Communication: The Sublime, Ineffable, and Spiritual Elements of Memes.” Popular viral content, like memes, are taking over the Internet. The presentation will address how memes strategically use art, symbolism and spirituality to attract attention and to help the audience feel emotion. Church has taught courses in popular culture, business communication, public speaking, public discourse, music and media studies. His research primarily uses critical theory, aesthetics and media ecology as analytic lenses for social media and mediated popular texts. The lectures were established in 1995 in honor of Ray Beckham’s late wife, Ida Lee. Raymond E. Beckham was a leader in education at BYU for 42 years. He was the driving force behind the BYU Evening school program, the BYU Travel Studies program, Aspen Grove, and founded the New York Internship program for Communications majors. INFORMATION Dates: Thursday March 16 Times: 11:00 a.m. Location: 321 Karl G. Maeser Building Admission: Free, no registration required